Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul are joining forces today to put pressure on the federal government to expedite work authorization for asylum seekers.
Hundreds of St. John’s University graduates are now entering the workforce.
The Archbishop Molloy High School Girls Softball Team is playing for The Brooklyn-Queens Championship Today.
The Knights of Columbus are coming through with a big donation for The Diocese of Brooklyn.
One senior at the Mary Louis Academy was accepted to 15 colleges, including four ivy league schools.
Catholic Schools in the Diocese of Brooklyn are outperforming the city’s public schools in their state exams, especially in their reading scores.
One Brooklyn couple decided to send their son to a Diocesan School, even though they are not Catholic.
Students at St. Saviour’s High School collected non-perishable items and donated the supplies to CHiPS, a soup kitchen in Park Slope, amid the city’s migrant crisis.
The future is here.
Tomorrow’s scientists are the Catholic school students of today.
Students at Our Lady of Grace showcased their STEM skills at this year’s Invention Convention.
Fourth to eighth graders designed more than 120 inventions as part of Catholic Schools Week in February.
The students worked on their projects for months.
For some, like Khloe Chavez, it was a chance to promote her newly upgraded umbrella dubbed “the tornado.”
At the end of the convention, five winners from each grade were chosen and presented with a certificate.
STEM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, is a priority throughout the diocese.
Every school offers some kind of specialized STEM program, according to the superintendent’s office.
It is programs like this that make the Diocese of Brooklyn schools so sought after.
This year the schools had a new leader, Deacon Kevin McCormack.
He joins Currents News with a look back on his first year as superintendent of schools for the Diocese of Brooklyn.
If you’re interested in sending your children to a Catholic school near you, just visit catholicschoolsbq.org or call 718-965-7380 for more information.
Chloe Riche’s time at The Mary Louis Academy is coming to an end. It’s all been leading up to a moment she’ll never forget, when she opened her acceptance letter from Princeton University.
“I started sobbing immediately, just fell in my chair crying, it was a wash of relief,” She said.
But Chloe’s acceptance into Princeton started many years ago, in her family’s kitchen. The admissions essay that won them over was about the time she spent baking with her grandmother.
“She left me some of her recipes to bake so I can always think of her I learned so many baking techniques from her and I keep them dear to my heart still to this day,” said Chloe.
Her grandma passed away in 2020 but the times they had together are some of her most cherished, they made her who she is.
“Ever since I was a little kid the kitchen is my home, it started with cooking but it led to baking because I realized how much I loved baking and eating the sweet result of it, it was more rewarding,” she said.
In total, Chloe was accepted into 15 colleges including four Ivy League schools. 26 of her classmates will also be attending Ivy League schools. The Mary Louis Academy Principal Ann O’Hagan-Cordes says it’s been an exceptionally competitive year, Ivy League acceptance rates have hit a record low.
“The data that’s been coming out of colleges and all the reports that Ivys aren’t accepting many students this year the acceptance rate has been lower than in many recent years so to have someone like Chloe, I’m so proud of all of them,” said O’Hagan-Cordes.
At The Mary Louis Academy, Chloe’s been challenged and pushed academically. Her work ethic has been molded by her teachers and peers since day one.
“I feel accomplished I feel like everything I’ve done all the hard work, all the late nights have been worth it,” she said.
Chloe will be a tiger by fall, wearing her stripes confidently at Princeton. She says she knows her grandmother is looking down, proud of her and that is the sweetest result.
By Jessica Easthope
They call Ocean Grove, New Jersey “God’s Square Mile,” and it just got a little longer, with a 500-foot pier that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean, shaped like a cross.
“It’s reflective of Ocean Grove’s history, as a Christian seaside resort, we have been this since our founding and it’s just a great design, practical, more views, it was an inspiration,” said Michael Badger, the president of the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association.
The association is a non-profit established after the end of the Civil War, when the Methodist church put down roots in the small shore town. The association owns all of the land in Ocean Grove, including the boardwalk, beach and the pier. When the town’s original pier was swept away by Hurricane Sandy, being a religious non-profit, the association wasn’t eligible for FEMA funding and raised $2M for the project. But the design sparked a debate about religious freedom.
“Historically it was a place of respite for missionaries and that’s the foundation of the town,” said Maryan Giachetti.
Giachetti has lived in Ocean Grove for seven years, her morning walk now includes coming to the ends of the pier, which some residents say is a secular space, where a cross doesn’t belong.
“It feels like a lot of the time everyone can voice their opinion and be who they want to be and don’t come against me because this is who I am and support us or you’re canceled and it feels like, except Christians,” she said.
“The free exercise of religion is not exclusively to be done in your home and your church sanctuary, you can be who you are in the public eye, especially on your own private land,” said Badger.
For Ocean Grove, the cross is a reminder that Christ welcomed everybody.
“This is who God calls us to be, we’re going to do this in the public square and you’re welcome, please come,” said Michael.
And that is the hope.
A community on the Jersey Shore has a new pier and it’s shaped like a cross.
A baby was born in the U.K. using the DNA of three people.
After city public school parents staged protests, migrants have been moved out of a Coney Island school gym.
A statue to celebrate new life has been installed on the campus of the Catholic University of America’s Theological College in Washington D.C.
If the cost of sending your children to Catholic school makes you hesitant, there may be a solution to that.
The non-profit organization Futures In Education provides financial aid and scholarships to those who need it.
The organization held a fundraiser Tuesday night to raise money to help send more children to Catholic schools in the Diocese of Brooklyn.
After the tables were set for dinner and a show, students from Midwood Catholic Academy got the party started at Cipriani’s.
“What a great night the Lord has given us,” said Bishop Robert Brennan, who was in attendance for the night’s festivities.
Students from St. Patrick Catholic Academy also showed off their talents and showed the donors in the room how great a Catholic education can be.
After receiving donations, they gave thanks to some special honorees, which included NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell, FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanaugh, Peter Golia, Barbara Naclerio, and Alejandro Monteverde.
The event raised $2.2 million for Futures In Education.
A moral crisis is developing after a baby was born using the DNA of three different people, in Britain.
The experimental technique is meant to prevent the passing on of rare genetic diseases, such as epilepsy and heart problems.
The procedure alters the DNA of an embryo by including the DNA from another person.
Catholic ethicists said the procedure presents a host of ethical and moral issues, since a human embryo is a new life and it should be respected and protected.
Additionally, it requires in vitro fertilization, which the Catholic Church has historically opposed.
Father Tad Pacholczyk, Director of Education at The National Catholic Bioethics Center, joins Currents News to discuss the new procedure and discuss the Church’s ethical concerns.
On Thursday, James Lukose’s seventh grade class at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Catholic Academy has a test on the last book they read in English language arts, a novel about a Holocaust survivor.
And down in first grade, students are reading about Rosa Parks and the racial barriers she broke during segregation. At this school reading isn’t just a subject – it’s everything.
“It’s going to take them from the world they’re in just even for a brief moment and allow them to be something more, dream bigger,” said principal Anne Zuschlag.
Zuchslag has been principal of the school for 30 years, she’s seen thousands of students graduate, all with a love of reading, and the school’s reading scores reflect that.
On the English language arts state exam, of all fourth graders in New York City’s public schools 43.6 percent are meeting or exceeding the standards set for their grade, at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs it’s 66.6 percent. For sixth grade there was a nearly 37 percent difference, and for seventh graders a 30 percent difference. The Diocese of Brooklyn as a whole outperformed doe schools in all three grades.
“We’re never really satisfied with where are kids are performing and I think that that drives us,” Zuschlag said.
James says in class reading is part of every subject and his teachers keep him interested.
“We’re either learning ELA in a packet, or reading a chapter of our book or doing online activities about the book itself, it’s like every day is something different,” he said.
When Marybeth McManus, the seventh and eighth grade ELA teacher, has 30 kids all with different interests working on the same assignment she modifies each lesson to highlight individual strengths.
“I see what’s working and what’s not working, I try not to do basic comprehension questions, I do questions that engage the students, we do a lot of group participation as well, what’s going on with the character, what are the conflicts in the book, just to try to keep them engaged,” she said.
Recently, New York City announced it would be changing its approach to reading instruction, instead of relying on context to help kids comprehend, it would be getting back to basics and utilizing a phonics-based curriculum, the one Our Lady Queen of Martyrs and the Diocese of Brooklyn never strayed from.
“Phonics is a really worthwhile approach for many children and so to have denied them the opportunity to use that strategy is unfortunate so I’m grateful they’re recognizing what we’ve known all along, we can adopt new things all the time but we don’t have to leave behind proven strategies,” Zuschlag said.
And even James can see how his teachers have been building on his reading skills from early on.
“In first grade I learned sounding out words and how to pronounce them and then in 2nd and 3rd I learned phonics and sight words and from 4th to now I learned reading strategies and writing strategies and how to comprehend and write a paragraph about a book,” he said.
And what numbers will never show is the excitement a new book can bring and how far reading will take these kids.
“It’s really devoted to a love of reading, for us if they’re happy and comfortable readers that are going to read life-long,” said Zuschlag. “We feel we’ve done our work.”
Thanks to a big fundraiser, more children will now be able to attend Catholic Schools in the Diocese of Brooklyn.
Test scores in Diocese of Brooklyn schools surpassed those in New York City Public Schools.
Parents of city public school students continue protesting the mayor’s plan to house migrants in school gyms, as busloads of new migrants arrive.
The terrorist accused of running over people on a West Side Highway bike path in 2017 has been sentenced today.